"Everyone knows strength training is better for muscle growth but cardio is better for fat loss... right?
Not right. A new study by Brellenthin et al. supports that strength training is more effective per minute of exercise than endurance training for both fat loss and muscle growth, or in this case specifically the prevention of fat gain.
The researchers followed about 12000 healthy adults around for 6 years and analyzed the probability someone would get obese relative to their exercise habits and other variables.
Of course, the more exercise people did, the lower their chance of becoming obese. When comparing the types of exercise, those who did at least 2 strength training workouts per week but no cardio had a lower obesity risk than those who did no strength training but did at least 500 MET-minutes of endurance training per week.
These results are in line with a 2015 meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials by Clark: during ad libitum diets, strength training induces more long-term fat loss per minute of exercise than cardio.
Strength training burns a comparable number of calories as cardio per session. Cardio can burn calories quicker but generally only at intensities you can't sustain for a full hour. However, strength training also increases your metabolic rate over time, whereas cardio does not. Gaining a lot of muscle has been found to increase energy expenditure considerably.
Second, strength training generally improves appetite control more than cardio.
Third, cardio suffers from constrained energy expenditure, whereas strength training does not (though maybe at super high volumes we haven't seen in research).
As a result, in real-life settings over the long run, strength training is generally more effective to reduce your energy intake and to increase your energy expenditure than an equal number of minutes of cardio.
Thus, if your primary goal is fat loss, unless you actively want to avoid muscle growth, you should spend your first exercise time on strength training. In fact, you don't have to spend any time on cardio at all. I generally only recommend cardio to a small portion of my female contest competitors that have to go down below 1200 kcal on training days otherwise. (Of course, if you like cardio, feel free to do it! All exercise types are better than none.)"
